How Sandeep Gajakas built unique shoe-laundry business in Mumbai & why he rebootd his strategy

Sandeep Gajakas wipes his spectacles clean, methodically and constantly. During the course of a two-hour interview at his residence in suburban Mumbai, Gajakas would have cleaned his glasses about half a dozen times. He also constantly places his phone and this correspondent's phone in straight lines, facing him. Haphazardness doesn't quite work for Gajakas.

"It [cleanliness] used to be almost like an OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] a few years ago," says the 35-year-old, smiling. "But marriage has had a good influence on me and I am a lot more at ease." Yet, Gajakas admits that he is very particular about keeping things clean, be it his house or his shoes. The latter — cleaning shoes — is how Gajakas has made a living since 2003. Gajakas is the proprietor of The Shoe Laundry, a shoe cleaning and repair service.

"I can make out the story of a person's life by looking at his shoes. Does he walk a lot? What does he do for a living? What is his lifestyle?" says Gajakas. And how does he divine these insights? Well, experience, he shrugs. "I would have cleaned 30,000 pairs of shoes and repaired some 60,000 pairs personally since 2003," he says. That might sound like an extraordinary claim, but then many things about Gajakas are just that: extraordinary.

Stepping Stone

Gajakas spends most of his time at home, chained to his BlackBerry or laptop. He reads and answers close to a hundred emails each day. A chunk of these emails have photographs of badly soiled or damaged shoes. These photographs have been emailed to Gajakas by employees and owners of the franchises of The Shoe Laundry from across the country. Gajakas looks at each image carefully and suggests a solution, which he emails back. The other emails are enquiries from people who are interested in investing in a Shoe Laundry franchise — known as Shoe Vival.

Gajakas hasn't always worked from home, even though he confesses that there are some great advantages in doing so — like having lunch on time. Till a year ago, he had an office, a workshop and a thriving business in Mumbai. "Back in 2009, we were doing 80-90 pairs of shoes a day and I had 16 employees at the workshop," recalls Gajakas. But then, he decided to close the booming business and focus on expanding his business network. But before we get to know why Gajakas chose to close down his Mumbai business, here's a quick look at how Gajakas built it from a scratch.

Squeaky Clean

When Gajakas was eight years old, he moved to a boarding school in Panchgani. There he excelled in sports and was an NCC cadet. His father, who worked with Air India, travelled the world and would purchase expensive, branded shoes that weren't available in India for Sandeep. "The discipline of NCC [where shoes are expected to be sparkling clean] and the need to maintain my expensive shoes was my first step towards shoe-cleaning expertise... though back then I never thought I would make a living out of it," says Gajakas. "I was a sportsman and cleaning red soil from sports shoes can be quite a challenge," he recalls with a smile. It was probably the beginning of his obsession with cleanliness.

In the late 1990s, as he was pursuing his bachelor's degree in Mithibai College in Mumbai, Gajakas remembers looking at thousands of students going about with dirty shoes, not without some degree of horror. But the shoe laundry idea still did not dawn on him. Armed with a degree in fire engineering, he was all set to move to the Gulf for a regular job in 2001. And then, 9/11 happened. Gajakas' parents shot down any move to the Gulf, afraid that a war was about to break out.

"So, there I was, stuck in India, with a degree that had few employment prospects, wanting to do something different, lots of dreams but nowhere to go," says Gajakas.

Sole Proprietor

Gajakas made a laundry list of businesses that he wanted to try his hand at. Among them were floriculture business, fashion choreography business (he had won several choreography shows in his college days), air-conditioning dealership (since a family friend owned an AC company) and shoe-cleaning business. A financial analysis of each business was done. Eventually, the shoe-laundry idea won simply because "it hadn't been done before and that excited" Gajakas.

Gajakas then hit the first roadblock: parental approval. His father was willing to help his son set up any business but the thought of a qualified, award-winning sports champ cleaning other people's shoes for a living horrified the parent. So, Sandeep found himself without funding. A job at a call centre followed, partly to raise some money.